OK, you have  found a good niche and researched its top keywords or you purchased one of my ready-to-market niche sites. Your site is built, optimized, and online . Now what do you do?

Believe it or not, many people sit back and only check their PayPal account waiting for affiliate sales to roll in at this point…but I KNOW that’s not you!

Hopefully, YOU already know (since you’ve studied my site and read my past emails) that Internet marketing success is not a , “build it and they will come” process. Unless your niche is EXTREMELY tiny, it will take more than simply submitting your site directly to Google. (In fact, I have not submitted a site that way for years….it does no good actually.)

So what’s next after your niche site is published to the web? First double check that the site is optimized well. Put your SEO thinking cap on and scour the site. Are the title tags optimized well? Are the pages all interlinked with optimized anchor text? Etc…

Once you are sure the site is “presentable” to the search engines, the “real” Internet marketing work can begin. What we call Off-Page optimization is where most of the meat is. Even poor On-Page optimization can be offset with super off-page optimization…but not the other way around.

Sure, it’s a LOT more fun to do all the brainstorming and site building/optimization than it is to do the grunt work of off-page optimization. No one…and I mean NO ONE enjoys it. I use VA’s now for the most part. But in the beginning I did it ALL. I think that is what’s called “paying one’s dues”.

When I refer to “off-page” optimization, I am particularly speaking about backlinks. A backlink is simply a link on someone else’s site that links back to your site. Google places a LOT of importance on backlinks. Both quantity and quality are important. But for a new site it’s all but impossible to get quality backlinks (those on sites that are already highly respected by Google), so you have no choice but to focus on quantity in the beginning.

These days (until Google changes things dramatically), all things being equal, a niche site with MANY low quality backlinks will outrank a similar site with FEW low quality backlinks (meaning few at all of course).

Therefore, with respect to competition, he who gets the most backlinks, wins.

HOWEVER, (in big bold caps) that is ONLY if all things are equal…they never all. So even though backlinks are vital for success, there are other factors too which come into play…just FYI.

Since we know backlinks are very important AND they are something we have control over, you’ll be focusing a LOT of time there.

So let’s get busy and begin building backlinks!

SPECIAL NOTE: Do NOT pay any service to get backlinks for you unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing. Some backlink building services will get your site banned. Stick to the basics for now and begin the process yourself.

Understand Basic Off-Page SEO 101: It helps a BUNCH if the backlink is in or near content associated with your site’s niche and the link uses optimized anchor text. For example, it does almost no good for your uncle to put a link on his gardening site to your dog training site. Worse still is if the anchor text read simply “click here”.

These steps I’m about to describe are what will determine if your niche site becomes even somewhat successful or if it simply takes up space on the web and gets no visitors.

Article Marketing:

NOTE: Article Marketing is a LOT of work! Unless you use a SUBMISSION TOOL LIKE THIS, you will burn out long before you have done enough backlinking to have success. I have been using that service for several years now with great success.

Article marketing is a favorite method for building backlinks. EzineArticles, ArticleBase, and GoArticles are some of the top sites to submit to. EzineArticles is the big one. At the VERY LEAST…and I do mean the VERY least…you will write original and optimized articles and submit them to EzineArticles. In the bio area you will have an optimized backlink to your site. You can either rewrite that article into an another original and submit it to the next directory, or you can have a VA rewrite it, or you can wait until it is published in EzineArticles and then submit it to the other directories.

That is how I began…by manually doing that process all myself. This is what you HAVE to do unless you have a few dollars to spend on marketing.

By the way, if you think submitting a “few” articles to the article directories is all you have to do, your niche had better be very tiny. A dozen or more articles is more the number I’m thinking of for most niches…to just get started.

If you have some marketing money to spend, I’ll briefly describe how I do this process in order to really leverage my efforts. If you don’t have any money to spend on marketing, follow these same steps…but you’ll have to do them manually.

First I write an original article or I have a qualified writer write it. That article gets submitted to EzineArticles. (Never submit your existing website content to article directories.) Next, I run the article through my “The Best Spinner” software. Spinning the article takes LONGER than it did to write it. I’ve tried many spinners…NOTHING compares to the quality of articles produced by The Best Spinner. Their spinning method is the best and will produce very good quality articles…not the junk you see in most spinners’ output. But it does require you spend  time in the spinning process. Otherwise, you’ll just have duplicated junk.

A NOTE ABOUT SPINNING ARTICLES: Look, I know that “spinning” has a bad reputation in some circles. Mainly that is because most spinners produce garbage. The Best Spinner does not…if used properly. Secondly, publishing virtually the same, but reworded content seems nothing more than trash publishing to some people. BUT right now, because Google makes the rules, spinning articles correctly IS a way to play the Google game and win in the niche site arena. I did not make the rules. I’m not saying this is “good” for the web. I’m just saying that today it works and has worked for some time.

After I spin the article (I begin with an article optimized for my top keyword) and have an almost unlimited supply of 70 to 80% original articles for that one keyword article (because I spent a LOT of time with The Best Spinner), I then take one of the spun articles and submit it to Submit Your Article. This software saves a LOT of time. You can submit your article to SYA and they will trickle your article out to dozens of directories and sites over time. In this case I turn off the submission to EzineArticlces if I was waiting for EA to publish. Now days EA publishes my articles super fast so I just use SYA for submitting to them too.)

So instead of having to manually submit to all these places to get backlinks, I just submit one time to SYA and that’s it – my article will then go out automatically over time to dozens of sites (I can select the time period…usually 30 days). Needless to say I can get MANY backlinks with this method while saving hours and hours of mind-numbing time spent on submitting.

Web 2.0 Sites: Next I take another spun article The Best Spinner produced and build a one-page Web 2.0 site with it. I’ll make specific Web 2.0 sites on Tumblr, HubPages, Squidoo, WordPress.com, and Blogger. HubPages takes some work before the links are do follow, but it’s worth working with that. I will have backlinks in all those articles pointing back to my main site of course. I may even add additional articles over time to these Web 2.0 sites and develop them out a bit.

I’ll then write new articles and submit them to the article directories using Submit Your Article. I’ll submit at least one article for each of the Web 2.0 sites I created. In each bio I’ll link directly to that Web 2.0 page. This helps give the Web 2.0 sites some relevance which in turn gives the link they contain to my main site more relevance.

Link Directory Submission: These don’t have the importance they used to have either, but are still worth some effort. First of all, do a search in Google for” “your niche” directory submit your URL”….or try “submit your site”. See if there are any link directories specific to your niche you can submit your site to for free. (Never pay for directory link submissions…it’s not worth it now days.) Find as many of those as you can in your spare time. Next, omit the “your niche” and just find directories that allow submissions and submit a link to their appropriate category for you niche. I actually use a VA service for this process. Again, it’s one of those mind numbing jobs that needs to be done, but probably you could better spend your time doing more important things. …if your budget allows for it.

Bookmarking: Here again, this is mind numbing work. But if you choose, you can register with 10 or 15 of the top bookmarking sites and bookmark your site’s pages, your SYA linked pages, and your Web 2.0 sites. If you do this, always bookmark OTHER related sites in your bookmarking accounts too so as not to ONLY have your sites listed. For this, I usually use a bookmarking service I trust. These are not very high value links, so omit this step until you have done well with everything else I have listed to do.

After you have created this simple “link wheel” for your site, it’s time for some patience. Don’t just stop writing articles for submission, etc., but you can slow down. As you move onto your next niche site, continue writing and submitting articles….but at a far lower rate. Also, you can begin adding a page or two of new content to your main site now and then too for a while. But most of all, know that it will take time for all this to kick in. You may not see measurable result for several months. However, you could see results in a few weeks. There is NO EXACT SCIENCE to this. In fact, you may never see results…there are no guarantees. All we can do is do the best we can in “playing the SEO game” …with the current rules as we see them.